Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and ye...
Well, one of the things a lot of Americans don't know, when Mitt Romney is nominated a few days from now, he will be the most experienced executive to be nominated for the presidency since Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, who had run a university and had r...
I think the International Criminal Court could be a threat to American security interests, because the prosecutor of the court has enormous discretion in going after war crimes. And the way the Statute of Rome is written, responsibility for war crime...
Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from th...
We will never win this war until we understand the effect that Guantanamo Bay has had on the overall war effort. And we'll never get the support of the American people if we can't prove to them that these folks that we're dealing with are not common ...
Everyone says we have our first African American president. Has there ever been a Jewish president? An Italian president? They don't say a damn thing about that. You think we're still fighting the Civil War or something. If you want to mention it in ...
There's a tendency on the part of Americans, all of us, to say, 'Hey, the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is gone, we don't have to worry about these guys again.' We always have to be worried about them, we always have to be concerned about them, ...
It is truly vital for the United States to assure that it is not attacked with weapons of mass destruction; to prevent wars in other countries from spreading onto American soil; and to maintain access to global sea lanes on which our economy depends....
I believe that if we think back to the period from F.D.R. through, let us say, Bush I, until the end of the Cold War, we lived through an artificial period in which American interests and European interests essentially dovetailed.
Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself luc...
The first question we must address deals with optimism, the possibility of achieving our goal. Are we in a position where we can actually hope to effect change? Assuming we become convinced that there are reasons for optimism, we move to the next que...
Hey, Pedro, could you get your shopping cart out of my faculty parking space? Yes, I know you live on the street. But you know how hard it is to find a parking spot on the Upper West Side. After all, you used to be one of my best students! So how's t...
Republics never survive, for their people do not like freedom but prefer to be led and guided and flattered and seduced into slavery by a benevolent, or not so, benevolent despot. They want to worship Caesar. So, American republicanism will inevitabl...
My next fight would not be measured in rounds, but throughout a lifetime. It would sustain and fulfill me longer than anything in the cage could. My opponent, my fight, would be against the slipping aspects of American society.
[American ambulance crews] salvaged people we'd never see in Missing, because no one would have tied to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here.
We [Americans] became a nation of java junkies, wired from dawn to dusk intent on running faster, getting richer, dancing harder, playing longer and getting higher than anybody else.
Billions of dollars worth of research knowledge lie dormant at American universities waiting for the right disruptor to come along and create a business.
In the decades following the Revolution, America changed so much and so rapidly that Americans not only became used to change, but came to expected and prize it.
Americans became so thoroughly democratic that much of the period's political activity, beginning with the Constitution, was diverted to finding means and devices to tame that democracy.
Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like slavery, and therefore too true to be good.
The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath.
